The Latin Character of English Culture is the lecture with which Dragoș Protopopescu (1892-1948), Romanian specialist in English Studies, opened his course at the University of Cernăuți, where he had just been appointed head of the English Department.

This volume consists of the lecture itself, a portrait of the author as Zoe Dumitrescu Bușulenga (Romanian literary critic, his former student) remembers him, and a chronology of the writer’s life and work, by Andi Bălu.

C. George Sandulescu’s preface summarizes the importance of this lecture in the context of English Studies in Romania. It also concludes that, what Romans did for Europe, England did for the entire world. If Latin conquered Europe, English has conquered the planet.

Dragoș Protopopescu starts from the fact that, for historical reasons, English only made its way into Romania in the 19th Century. The Latin roots of English culture go as far back as the Roman Conquest, the Norman Conquest and the Classicism that was still strong in England in the 18th Century. He describes the British Empire as stemming from the Roman Empire, but significantly outreaching it.

The present has proved that the Romanian scholar was right. English is today a world-wide means of communication. More than that, computers and the internet have turned it into a borderless Empire of the Mind.

Bucharest, 24 November 2011

C. George Sandulescu and Lidia Vianu

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